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<div class="titlepage"><div><div><h4 class="title">
<a name="spirit.qi.tutorials.quick_start"></a><a class="link" href="quick_start.html" title="Quick Start">Quick Start</a>
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<h6>
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          <span class="phrase"><a name="spirit.qi.tutorials.quick_start.why_would_you_want_to_use_spirit_qi_"></a></span><a class="link" href="quick_start.html#spirit.qi.tutorials.quick_start.why_would_you_want_to_use_spirit_qi_">Why
          would you want to use Spirit.Qi?</a>
        </h6>
<p>
          Spirit.Qi is designed to be a practical parsing tool. The ability to generate
          a fully-working parser from a formal EBNF specification inlined in C++
          significantly reduces development time. Programmers typically approach
          parsing using ad hoc hacks with primitive tools such as scanf. Even regular-expression
          libraries (such as boost regex) or scanners (such as Boost tokenizer) do
          not scale well when we need to write more elaborate parsers. Attempting
          to write even a moderately-complex parser using these tools leads to code
          that is hard to understand and maintain.
        </p>
<p>
          One prime objective is to make the tool easy to use. When one thinks of
          a parser generator, the usual reaction is "it must be big and complex
          with a steep learning curve." Not so. Spirit is designed to be fully
          scalable. The library is structured in layers. This permits learning on
          an as-needed basis, after only learning the minimal core and basic concepts.
        </p>
<p>
          For development simplicity and ease in deployment, the entire library consists
          of only header files, with no libraries to link against or build. Just
          put the Spirit distribution in your include path, compile and run. Code
          size? -very tight -essentially comparable to hand written recursive descent
          code.
        </p>
<p>
          Our tutorials will walk you through the simplest Spirit examples, incrementally
          building on top of the earlier examples as we expose more and more features
          and techniques. We will try to be as gentle as possible with the learning
          curve. We will present the tutorials in a cookbook style approach. This
          style of presentation is based on our BoostCon '07 and BoostCon '08 slides.
        </p>
<p>
          Have fun!
        </p>
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<td align="right"><div class="copyright-footer">Copyright © 2001-2011 Joel de Guzman, Hartmut Kaiser<p>
        Distributed under the Boost Software License, Version 1.0. (See accompanying
        file LICENSE_1_0.txt or copy at <a href="http://www.boost.org/LICENSE_1_0.txt" target="_top">http://www.boost.org/LICENSE_1_0.txt</a>)
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